These are the CIOs who have won.

As a group, they have aligned IT with business goals, managed relationships in boardrooms and IT back rooms, hired well and kept up with technology trends—all while producing results. Read on to learn more about their accomplishments and why we chose them to enter CIO's Hall of Fame—and be sure to check out the Class of 1997.

Technology and Process Transformer

Gregor Bailar
Former CIO, Capital One

“I’m a geek at heart. I love to play with new technology, test it, sometimes even break it! But what’s most important about being a CIO isn’t your technical prowess, it’s the ability to engage with the right people who will rally around the right ideas and help make them possible. To see them develop into tremendous leaders, that experience beats any system implementation or architectural overhaul I may have had a hand in.”

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Completed consolidation of Citibank’s worldwide corporate banking systems in 1996.... Joined Nasdaq and became the youngest CIO for a major stock market in 1997.... Led replacement of the original IT system for the Nasdaq stock market, which was completed in 2001.... Spearheaded adoption of Agile software development at Capital One and led IT’s adoption of mobile collaboration tools and work spaces in 2004.... Completed the largest credit card systems conversion project in history at Capital One in 2006.... Mentored almost a dozen IT executives, including the CIOs of Kaiser, Red Hat, Nasdaq, T. Rowe Price, NPR and Reuters.

Most people know Bailar is retiring from Capital One this year; what they don’t know is that he plans to pursue philanthropic interests with his wife. He says they will be focusing on two big areas: poverty and international development, and environmental responsibility.

CRM Revolutionary

John Boushy
CEO and President, Ameristar Casinos

“I realized [IT’s] core competency was in the relationships we create with our customers. We wanted to expand that competency using automated tools.”

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As CIO of Harrah’s Entertainment, Boushy in 1994 began building WINet, the gaming industry’s first national recognition and rewards system to encourage customer loyalty....

Led a huge multi­year integration to connect transactional AS/400 mainframes at 20 Harrah properties to a single Unix database (a feat vendors said couldn’t be done).... By 2001, the rewards system had saved Harrah’s $20 million a year in overall costs and increased the number of customers playing at more than one property by 72 percent.... In 2006 he became president of Ameristar, and then later its CEO.

In the middle of 1996, technical difficulties temporarily slowed the WINet project. To show confidence in the team, Boushy let his then-short hair grow until WINet was up. According to CIO, Boushy’s hair was a Samson-like shoulder length by the time WINet was running in February 1997.